Anti-Whining: Happy Moko Moments

[David Fokkema]

On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 15:13 -0400, Warren Baird wrote:
> There seems to be a repeated theme of people posting how crappy the
> Freerunner is and how nothing works for them.  Usually a number of
> people then jump on the thread and talk about how the FR works well
> for them.
> 
> I like to try turning that around and start a thread for people to
> talk about their successes.   Maybe if we get enough good ones we can
> push it onto the wiki.

Well, not really a success (yet), but at least interesting, I think. We
hear a lot on the list that product X is way better than the FR. But
often, it's also the other way around. Using the FR as controller for a
robot/helicopter/race car/etc. is one thing. Using the FR as an
alternative to this (Nagios SMS notification)

http://www.nagios.org/products/notification/foxbox/

which will cost you E 780,- seems almost ridiculously easy. You'll have
to write some scripts for it, but with FSO sending and receiving SMS is
very easy using d-bus. You can use usb networking and python has
built-in server-client libraries, so no difficulties there as well.

Of course, you could send a machine-readable sms (as opposed to
human-readable) to let the receiving end (of course, a FR as well)
generate a nice notification screen (with graphs, for example) instead
of just a texted sms.

That'll show those iPhone users who still browse the default nagios
interface (ugly!) on their screen after receiving a simple text message.

(Now _don't_ tell me there exists a very cool iPhone app for this!)

David